In recent years, PC's and other computers have experienced significant rapid advances in processor speed and performance, in available memory, and in system architecture that frequently result in the computers being rendered obsolete within months of being announced and, sometimes, shortly after the products hit dealers shelves. This creates problems for customers, particularly major corporate and other institutional customers who want or need to keep their systems at or near state-of-the-art performance levels without incurring significant upgrade expenses every few years. It creates even greater problems for manufacturers and dealers whose inventory can quickly become obsolete, resulting in returns or significant markdowns on recently delivered computers and computer systems.
One solution to this problem is to ship computers and computer systems to dealers without the portions of such systems, such as processors and memory, which are most likely to require upgrading, and to permit the dealers to install the most current versions of such components at or near the time of sale. However, PC's, workstations and other such computers have heretofore required substantial disassembly in order to provide access to their central circuit boards, i.e., the "motherboards," containing critical components such as processor chips and memory boards. As these tasks typically must be performed by trained service personnel, the time and expense of installing these components at the retail level renders uneconomical shipping computers that are not fully complete and operational. Field upgrades by institutional users are also time-consuming and expensive and, accordingly, are seldom made. Further, though existing computer architectures permit a computer chip or memory board to be replaced, they do not provide sufficient flexibility to permit a retailer or end-user to move from one processor family to another, for example, from Pentium.TM., to ALPHA.TM., to Pentium Pro.TM., to Power PC.TM., etc. Rather, upgrades are limited to processors within a given family and, then, only with considerable effort.
Finally, as processors and memories are designed which provide increasing power, speed, and capacity in the same or smaller spaces, the heat generated by such components also increases, and heat removal becomes a limiting factor in the power and speed of a given computer. Thus, any computer architecture which permits power and speed upgrades must provide sufficient heat management to accommodate such upgrades.
In view of the foregoing, an object of the invention is to provide improved computer architectures and components thereof. More particularly, an object is to provide computer architectures and components that facilitate easy installation, replacement and upgrades both within and between processor families.
A still further object of the invention is to provide such architectures and components that facilitate such installation, replacement and upgrades within the same computer housing or chassis.
Yet still another object of the invention is to provide such architectures and components that provide improve heat management so as to accommodate operating requirements of newer and faster hardware.
Still yet another object of the invention is to provide such architecture and components for use with PC's, as well as workstations, file servers and other more powerful computers, some of which may include multiple processor chips on a single motherboard.
A further object of the invention is to provide such architecture and components that are compatible with existing architectures and that can be implemented with minimal cost.